“Everything okay?” Gary asks.
“It’s my husband calling,” Phoebe says. “My ex-husband, I mean. I have to practice saying that.”
“Good luck,” he says. “I still have trouble saying ‘my dead wife.’”
“There have to be better options.”
“Nothing else sounds much better,” he says. “My deceased wife?”
“Too formal,” Phoebe says.
“My late wife?”
“Too old-fashioned.”
“My first wife.”
“Asshole.”
“My departed spouse.”
“Okay, now you just sound like you murdered her. You’re right. I see your problem.”
“There is always the option of just calling her Wendy,” he says. “But it feels wrong to do it around Lila. It feels … rude somehow.”
Which is a real shame, he says, because he always liked the name Wendy. So did Juice, who said “Wendy” even before she said “Mama,” maybe something to do with how many times Juice watched Peter Pan, he wasn’t sure.
“Wendy was disappointed by it, she was like, what am I, her co-worker?” Gary says. “But after she died, I was glad that from the very beginning she could see her mother as a person.”
“That’s a nice way to think about it,” Phoebe says. “Can I ask how Juice got the nickname?”
“It’s something Wendy used to call her,” Gary says. He explains that Juice had so much energy as a toddler, zipping back and forth across the room, with this incredible strength. Wendy would always laugh about her being juiced up.
“We stopped calling her that a long time ago, but after Wendy died, Juice started asking to be called that again,” Gary says. Then, as if he fears he has been rude for talking so much about his family, he asks, “Do you have kids?”
“No,” Phoebe says. “I mean, I tried.”
She tells him about all the trying. About IVF. About how that might have been when the depression started. It was hard to say. Hard to work backward and see the beginning. All those appointments and by the end, Matt didn’t want to come.
“Matt?”
“My ex-husband,” she says. “He never wanted to come. He said he was okay doing IVF but then would look at the medications in the fridge and say, This is all so expensive. And it was. But I also know it was his way of telling me he wanted it to happen naturally. He wanted the child to light up inside me like a firefly. He wanted it to be so obvious, so natural, that no doubt had any room to creep in.”
But they had appointments. Phoebe had polyps. She had operations.
“Then the egg-stractions,” she says.
“Egg-stractions?”
“Technically, they’re called retrievals. But they should be called Eggstractions, right? I mean, come on. It’s just sitting right there.”
The Eggstraction, she joked with her husband. Sounds like a horror story someone should write.
“But Matt wouldn’t joke about it with me. He was just like, Oh God, who would read that story?”
“A lot of people would.”
The hotel is visible now. The bridal brunch is waiting inside. Phoebe takes small, slow steps.
“Here we go,” Gary says.
“Not ready to talk to people again?”
“It’s just been a lot of family,” Gary says. “I’m supposed to be having coffee with them right now, but there are only so many times I can listen to Marla list off the price of various houses in the neighborhood.”
“Marla’s pretty funny,” Phoebe says.
“She really is,” Gary says. “Even though I know she can be a lot for people.”
“A lot can be okay. It can be good. It’s better than nothing.”
It’s what Phoebe longed for in the silence of her house growing up. Her father was not a loud person, and neither was she, but she wanted to be. She longed for a lot of noise in the kitchen, for clanging pots, for the sounds of people laughing by the fire.
“I used to dream of having one of those big families in nineteenth-century British novels,” Phoebe says.
“I thought you dreamed of being an orphan?”
“Well, if I couldn’t be an orphan, then I wanted a big messy family,” she says. “Like in Pride and Prejudice or something.”
